ARM unveils Cortex-A12 and Mali-622 mid-range CPU and GPU

ARM has a problem – Cortex-A9 is old and the new Cortex-A15 cores just can't seem to make it to the market (the Exynos 5 Octa and Tegra 4 both have issues getting on shipping devices). The company just announced an interim solution, the Cortex-A12.

It offers a 40% performance increase over the A9 and should bring some power saving to the table too. It supports big.LITTLE configurations so it can be paired with Cortex-A7 to improve power efficiency even further (whether it will work or not is another matter, the A15/A7 pairing doesn’t do too well).

ARM's GPU line is in a similar spot – the new Mali-600 series really only shipped on the Google Nexus 10, most current chipsets rely either on a PowerVR GPU or an Adreno. So, here comes the Mali-622, a mid-range GPU to go with Cortex-A12.

When I compare Cortex A12 with my home-PC CPU, Core2Duo, I see few same specs and most of them better than my CPU. OFC, PC CPUs will always be more reliable with less bugs and slowdowns (process overload, regardless to No of cores), but as I can see,...